On top of a free money management platform, and articles, courses and other finance-related resources, the company, earlier this year launched fee-based packages that pair users with Certified Financial Planners across the country.

On Tuesday, LearnVest is not only rolling out a series of significant updates, including its first mobile app, it is announcing that it has become an SEC-Registered Investment Advisor (RIA).

“Financial planning shouldn’t be a luxury,” CEO and founder Alexa von Tobel told me. “The less money you have, the more important it is for you to know about how to manage it. Financial planning is a consumer product… Making a financial plan should be like getting a gym membership.”

As part of its new status as an RIA, von Tobel said LearnVest had to undergo a months-long approval process and hire a compliance officer to lead a new six-person compliance team.  But to bring financial planning – typically a service reserved for the wealthiest consumers – to a general audience, she said it was important that the company formalize its fiduciary commitment to users.

The company, which has raised a total of $24.5 million, declined to share its most recent membership numbers but said that as of six months ago it had 300,000 users (a third of whom log into the site every other day). It currently gets about 800,000 unique visitors each month and has quadrupled the number of users on its money management center.

While the site initially targeted women, since launching its paid products, LearnVest has expanded its reach to a wider audience. Individual male users now account for a quarter of the site visitors, but that number doesn’t include couples who use it to jointly manage household finances. Von Tobel also said that users range from twenty-somethings to seventy-somethings. Some are  hundreds of dollars in debt, some have millions of dollars in assets.

In addition to its new SEC-registered status, LearnVest is announcing:

• its first mobile app (which should go live next month) which lets users easily track spending, manage transactions and quickly view their overall financial position
• an upgraded free money center, which includes improved functionality for tracking trends, monitoring progress towards goals and organizing transactions
• the ability for LearnVest CFPs to co-view and collaboratively add information to user accounts during phone sessions with users
• an updated suite of three packages of financial planning services  that range from a basic $89 “budget starter” plan a $599 “portfolio builder” plan (with the new plans, the company has raised its fees from $69 for the basic plan and $349 for the top tier plan, but said the CFPs now advise across a greater range of topics)

Despite LearnVest’s platform improvements, friendly user interface and network of affordable financial planners, joining the site requires a potentially daunting upfront commitment of time and energy from those unaccustomed to using Web 2.0 money management tools. And, consumers already using Mint may feel that their financial planning needs are met.

But von Tobel, who dropped out of Harvard Business School to launch LearnVest,is making significant headway in bringing technology and consumability to an industry that has long focused on the wealthiest and already financially savvy consumers. The company builds all of its products on its own financial planning method that balances essentials, lifestyle costs and savings for the future, and its 50 nationwide CFPs are equipped to advise consumers on everything from student debt to buying a home to estate planning.

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Seattle-based FutureAdvisor allows users to link their investment accounts and get free, personalized advice on their portfolio. The company, which launched its service in March, isn’t releasing the number of users it serves but says that it has more than $4 billion in assets linked by customers.

FutureAdvisor is designed to give a lot of simple advice to users without forcing them to pay for a personal advisor like Personal Capital or open a new account as WealthFront does. Users just get simple computer-generated tips on how to eliminate fees and taxes, diversify their existing portfolio and achieve their financial goals. The company is rolling out a new personalized 401k analysis tool that lets users see what fees are being applied to their 401k plans and how to reduce them.

FutureAdvisor plans on making money in future by offering a premium tier of services. But there will always be a free level of service, said co-founder Bo Lu. He said the financial services market currently offers financial advice to about ten percent of American households who have enough assets and can afford to pay the quarter of a million human advisors in business today. But he said the bigger opportunity is in offering accessible tools to the vast majority of the market that has some investments but often don’t understand how to optimize it.

“Software hasn’t eaten finance yet but it will and we will do it,” said Lu.

FutureAdvisor previously raised $1 million in seed funding last year from Sequoia, Rabois and Stoppelman. The new money will be used to expand its operations and build its team.

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Previously, Lemon was more of a Dropbox for receipts. Users took pictures of their receipts or took email receipts and forwarded them to their Lemon.com email address. Lemon extracts data from the receipts about the merchant and product making it easy for people to track their spending. But now, with Lemon 3.0, users can have their purchases organized by category, so they can better see where their money is going to. They can also get a summary of labeled items and a daily spend linear graph. There’s also new ability to sort and filter transactions and a family plan, so up to 10 members of one family can pool their receipts to see how the whole household is spending collectively. A Lemon app is available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian.

The basic service is free to scan an unlimited number of receipts, get a summary of spending and export receipts and data. A premium data plan, which provides additional features to track spending, taxes and gain more complete records, is $9 a month, or $50 a year. The family plan starts at $3 per month or $20 for a year. And a $4 a month business plan for companies is also on the way.

Wences Casares, the founder and CEO of Lemon said the latest update gives users more tools to track their overall spending. He said over time, Lemon will also add budgeting features, taking Lemon even further into Mint territory. But he said Lemon is not aiming for the same base of users.

“We see Mint as a service for people who are serious about about personal finances. We want to appeal to customers who are more casual about finances because most people don’t have the time or discipline to dig into receipts,” Casares said.

What I like about Lemon is that it’s good for tracking cash transactions. While services such as Mint can automatically connect to checking and credit accounts, users have to manually enter their cash payments. With Lemon, they can make sure all those little payments here and there are accounted for. That is, if they remember to take a picture of a receipt. But with the way Lemon is set up, it’s designed to make it easy to do that.

Users may balk at the pricing of the premium plans. And some users have complained of bugs and a more cluttered UI with the latest update. But many are finding it’s a good way to keep on top of their spending. I think this is helpful to avoid the clutter of receipts in my wallet, though it takes some discipline to keep snapping pictures of receipts. But when you do, there’s that nice feeling of throwing away some excess paper and knowing you’ve got the data in the cloud.

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New York City-based Bundle’s data currently comes from Citi and the U.S. government, and covers categories like shopping, food and health. Within each category, you can see how much people who live near you spend, what merchants they commonly patronize, and how that compares to the rest of the U.S. (No surprise, the largest U.S. grocery shopping destination within the system is Wal-Mart, followed by Wal-Mart Supercenters. In my San Francisco zip code, it’s Safeway followed by Trader Joe’s.)

A core challenge for the site is balancing anonymity vs. detail, said CEO Jaidev Shergill, who incubated Bundle while still in his former role at Citi’s Growth Ventures Unit. That goes for users; while Citi’s spending data clearly needs to be anonymized, if it’s made too vague it’s not useful; and for advertisers, who are very interested in detailed targeting.

Though early reports had said Bundle wanted to compete directly with Mint (which was sold to Intuit in September for $170 million), at the moment Bundle doesn’t have personal finance management tools. However Shergill said that early users (the site opened Wednesday) are asking to get more hands-on with their own accounts, so it’s likely that Bundle will try to integrate with Mint or build its own version.

Bundle has put effort into content creation, with an editorial team writing articles and quizzes and picking out interesting data points (like “Young, wealthy, and still shopping at Target” or “What’s your spending type?“) and a community message board. But for now, its main asset is the pretty bubble graphs and charts. Coming soon, said Shergill, will be local data sets for rents and mortgages as well as saving.

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The startup’s founder, Daniel Carroll, who’s traded stocks since he was 15 years old, said the site provides people with a cheaper and more transparent alternative to putting their money in mutual funds. For example, people can make a minimum investment of $3,000 on the site. Carroll said Fairview Capital, for instance, generally doesn’t take investments less than $1 million, but it does so on kaChing. kaChing investors, who range from amateurs to investment management firms, are assigned an “Investing IQ” score that’s based on similar factors used by Ivy League endowment managers, such as risk adjusted returns and the quality of the rationale behind their trades. Investors who receive a score of 140 or higher are classified as a “Genius,” of which there are currently 12 on the site.

People who want to invest according to the trades of their selected kaChing investors have to pay a management fee to them kaChing, which averages around 1 percent. kaChing takes a 25 percent cut of that fee and gives 75 percent of it back to the investor. Once people set up an account, they can follow their investments in real-time on a dashboard, and the site sends email updates if an investor makes any unexpected moves. The site faces competition from Covestor, which also lets people track investors.

kaChing is a 12-person team. Carroll said it has raised around $3 million from angel investors. And he has big plans for the company, setting his sights on an IPO. “Hopefully, you’ll see our ticker on the New York Stock Exchange” five to ten years down the road, he said.

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